Altering of Worker Time Cards Spurs Growing Number of Suits

Published: April 4, 2004

Correction Appended

(Page 2 of 2)

''They told us to sign the payroll printouts to confirm it was right,'' Mr. Pooters said, describing a confrontation last November. ''When we protested about what happened with our lunch hours, the manager said, 'If you don't sign, you're not going to get paid.' ''

Mr. Coombs said: ''They removed our lunch hours all the time. We were told if we didn't sign the payroll sheets, we'd be terminated.''

Larry Gorski, Rentway's vice president for human resources, said his company strictly prohibited erasing time. ''As soon as we hear this is going on, we jump all over it,'' he said.

Shannon Priller, who worked at a Family Dollar store in Rio Rancho, N.M., sheepishly acknowledged that she sometimes watched her district manager erase her hours. ''The manager and I would sit there and go over everybody's time cards,'' she said. ''We were told not to go over payroll, or we would lose our jobs. If we were over, my hours would get shaved.''

Some weeks, she said, she lost 10 or 15 hours, and her 6 a.m. clock-in time became 9 a.m. Patricia Bauer, a clerk at the store, said her paycheck was sometimes cut to under 30 hours on weeks when she worked 40.

Like Mr. Pooters, these women have joined a lawsuit that accuses Family Dollar of erasing time and requiring off-the-clock work. ''It needs to stop,'' said Ms. Priller, who now cleans houses.

Kim Danner said that when she ran a Family Dollar store with eight employees in Minneapolis, her district manager urged her to erase hours so that she never paid overtime or exceeded her allotted payroll. Federal law generally requires paying time-and-a-half to nonmanagerial employees who work more than 40 hours a week.

Ms. Danner said her employees could not do all the unloading, stocking, cashier work and pricing of merchandise in the hours allotted. ''The message from the district manager was, basically, 'I don't care how you do it, just get it done,' '' she said.

So she altered clock-out times and inserted half-hour lunch breaks even when employees had worked through them. ''I felt horrible that I was doing this,'' she said. ''I felt pressured, absolutely. If I refused, I would have been terminated easily.''

After five months, she quit.

Sandra Wilkenloh, Family Dollar's communications director, declined to respond to the lawsuit, but said, ''Family Dollar's policy is to fully comply with all wage and hour laws and to take appropriate disciplinary action in any case where we determine that such policy has been violated.''

She said Family Dollar maintained a hot line that employees could call anonymously to report wage violations.

Rosann Wilks, who was an assistant manager at a Pep Boys in Nashville, said she was fired in 2001 after refusing to delete time. She said her district manager told her, ''Under no circumstances at all is overtime allowed, and if so, then you need to shave time.''

At first, she bowed to orders and erased hours. Some employees began asking questions, she said, but they refused to confront management. ''They took it lying down,'' she said. ''They didn't want to lose their job. Jobs are hard to find.''

When she started feeling guilty and confronted her district manager, she said, ''It all came to a boil. He fired me.''

Bill Furtkevic, Pep Boys' spokesman, said his company did not tolerate deleting time.

''Pep Boys' policy dictates, and record demonstrates, that any store manager found to have shaved any amount of employee time be terminated,'' he said. He added that the company's investigation ''revealed no more than 21 instances over the past five years where time shaving'' had occurred.

More than a dozen former Wal-Mart employees said time records were altered in numerous ways. Some said that when they clocked more than 40 hours a week, managers transferred extra hours to the following week, to avoid paying overtime. Federal law bars moving hours from one week to another.

Wal-Mart executives acknowledged that one common practice, the ''one-minute clock-out,'' had cheated employees for years. It involved workers who clocked out for lunch and forgot to clock back in before finishing the day. In such situations, many managers altered records to show such workers clocking out for the day one minute after their lunch breaks began -- at 12:01 p.m., for example. That way a worker's day was often three hours and one minute, instead of seven hours.

Ms. Williams, the Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said Wal-Mart had broadcast a video to store managers last April telling them to halt all one-minute clock-outs. Under the new policy, when workers fail to clock in after lunch, managers must do their best to determine what their true workday was.

In interviews, five former Wal-Mart managers acknowledged erasing time to cut costs. Victor Mitchell said that as an assistant manager in Hazlehurst, Miss., in 1997, he frequently shaved time.

''We were told we can't have any overtime,'' he said. ''It's what the other assistant managers were doing, and I went along with it.''

Mr. Mitchell said the store's manager ordered them to stop. But he said that in 2002, after becoming manager of a Wal-Mart in Bogalusa, La., a new district manager ordered him to erase overtime. He said he refused.

Ms. Williams said Wal-Mart had increased efforts to stop managers from shaving time or allowing off-the-clock work.

Wal-Mart has circulated a ''payroll integrity'' memo, saying that any worker, ''hourly or salaried, who knowingly falsifies payroll records is subject to disciplinary action up to and including termination.''

Employees at Wal-Mart and other companies complain that they receive no paper time records, making it hard to challenge management when their paychecks are inexplicably low.

Ms. Danner, the former Family Dollar manager, praised the system at the McDonald's restaurant she managed for seven years. At day's end, she said, employees received a printout detailing total hours worked and when they clocked in and out.

''We never had any problems like this at McDonald's,'' she said.

Photos: Rosann Wilks said she was fired as assistant manager at a Pep Boys in Nashville after refusing instructions to delete hours from work records. (Photo by Christopher Berkey for The New York Times); Drew Pooters, pictured with his wife, Anna, said managers at Toys ''R'' Us and Family Dollar deleted hours from employees' records to avoid paying overtime. The companies say their policies forbid that. (Photo by Joe Raymond for The New York Times)(pg. 22)

Correction: April 7, 2004, Wednesday A front-page article on Sunday about doctoring of payroll time records misstated Wal-Mart's response to claims by some former employees that managers had sometimes altered the records of workers who forgot to clock back in after lunch, to make it appear that their workday ended at lunchtime. Although Wal-Mart acknowledged the practice, called the ''one-minute clock-out,'' it said the intent was to draw the workers' attention to problems with their time records, not to cheat employees.